Yohanan Rivlin, a professor at Haifa University, is a man of boundless and often naïve curiosity. His wife, Hagit, a district judge, is tolerant of almost everything but her husband's faults and prevarications. Frequent arguments aside, they are a well-adjusted couple with two grown sons. When one of Rivlin's students-a young Arab bride from a village in the Galilee-is assigned to help with his research in recent Algerian history, a two-pronged mystery develops. As they probe the causes of the bloody Algerian civil war, Rivlin also becomes obsessed with his son's failed marriage. Rivlin's search leads to a number of improbable escapades. In this comedy of manners, at once deeply serious and highly entertaining, Yehoshua brilliantly portrays characters from disparate sectors of Israeli life, united above all by a very human desire for, and fear of, the truth in politics and life. Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly As he has proved in acclaimed previous novels (Mr. Mani; Open Heart), Yehoshua is a keen observer of social and political realities, and a subtle writer capable of reflecting complex situations in events of daily life. Here, what at first appears to be a bittersweet comedy of domestic manners set in 1990s Israel morphs into a searching exploration of a politically divided society in which decent people, both Jews and Arabs, try to live peaceably with each other. To be sure, this is a small segment of Israeli society: the Israeli intelligentsia, represented by Professor Yochanan Rivlin and his wife, Hagit, a district judge, who live in Haifa, as well as educated Arabs in Galilee villages whose existence is circumscribed by the rules of occupation. Many mysteries shimmer beneath the narrative's surface. Underlying the affectionate domestic banter of Yochanan and Hagit is Yochanan's obsessive quest to discover what went wrong in the short marriage of their son and his wife, a quest complicated by a horrifying secret the sundered couple have vowed not to divulge. Meanwhile, an Arab graduate student of Yochanan's, whose wedding begins the narrative, seeks to earn her degree by translating the works of contemporary Arab poets collected by an Israeli scholar killed in a terrorist bombing. The threat of violence, while acknowledged by everyone, is not in the forefront of the plot, which is more concerned with the complacency of intelligent Israeli Jews in the face of the plight of their Arab neighbors. The grand achievement of this trenchant novel is its quietly provocative and deeply important consideration of how the desire for liberation of various kinds is inescapable in human nature. Although one character speaks in measured terms of "the abyss we are all about to fall into," it is the simple aspirations of ordinary people that illuminate the larger issues. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. From The New Yorker The three brides at the center of this gentle novel all refuse to do what Yochanan Rivlin, an aging Israeli professor of Near Eastern studies, wishes them to do. Samaher, a depressed Palestinian graduate student who is newly married, won't finish her seminar paper; Galya, soon to be a mother, won't tell him why she divorced his son; and Rivlin's wife, Hagit, a district judge, won't let him worry himself to death about it. Yehoshua, the most daring of the major Israeli writers, tells a simple story about a region that complicates all it touches. As Rivlin's obsession with his son's failed marriage grows, he also finds himself drawn into the world of his Palestinian student. The juxtaposition of a failed marriage and the turmoil of Israeli society suggests pointed political commentary, but Yehoshua's portrait of the hesitant courtship between the two peoples--sometimes tender and generous, sometimes grotesque and calamitous--remains, somehow, hopeful. Copyright ® 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.